It’s easier to ignore human trafficking if you think it mainly involves foreigners; easier still if you buy into the Pretty Woman myth that maybe it gives them a chance at a better life.

But that’s not the reality. Many, if not most, of the women and girls moved from city to city, brothel to brothel, were once just ordinary Canadian kids.

Natasha Falle was one of them.

A middle-class kid from a suburban Toronto neighbourhood, Falle’s dad was a cop and her mom ran a bridal shop.

She played centre on the soccer team and her parents came to as many games as they could. The family played board games and hung out together.

Then suddenly, everything changed. In a storm of emotional and verbal abuse, her parents marriage fell.

Falle and her mother moved to a downtown apartment. Her father gave them no money. Falle’s new friends were all hurting, like her. They stole cars together and smoked pot. As her mother spiralled downward spending all they had on liquor, Falle survived by stealing food.

She wrote suicidal poetry and wore black a lot. When her mother started bringing home strange and abusive men, home was no longer safe. Falle couch-surfed at friends’, sneaking in windows after their parents were asleep, sleeping in backyard tents.

Late one night, alone at 14 with nowhere to go, she met two girls her age. One was pregnant by their 42-year-old pimp. They invited her to stay at their apartment, promising it was safe. The pimp was away.

“I didn’t trust them,” Falle says. “But I had to because there was no other way to survive. They bought a cucumber on the way home to teach me how to use a condom to stay safe. They groomed me.”

(Falle admits a few years later she groomed and enticed her own friends into the sex trade. It’s one of the two most common ways into prostitution. The other is the “love lore” spun by pimps.)

Falle stayed at the apartment for a few days. She remembers men calling, knocking on the door and peering at them wherever they went.

“We were like bunnies in the forest, fresh meat for every drug dealer, pimp and pedophile,” she told a rapt audience at a Salvation Army lunch last week.

Falle left before the pimp returned, but a few months later, she fell prey to a well-dressed, clean-cut pimp she met at a bar. He seemed kind.

“For a 50-per-cent cut, he said he could hook me up with people in Calgary’s Chinatown. It sounded like a business exchange. Why not get paid? At least I wouldn’t be used like my mother was.

“It gave me an artificial sense of empowerment because it doesn’t sound so bad when it seems like a business deal.”

The next night, she had her first customer on a dirty, stained mattress in a stuffy attic above a restaurant.

“I got paid $100 and it looked like $1 million to a kid who didn’t know what she was going to eat or where she was going to sleep.

“The next day, I went to Ikea to buy furniture so I could prove to my parents that I didn’t need them.”

The pimp sent her off to Calgary and then on the circuit that includes Edmonton, Vancouver and Kelowna.

“My father was a police officer. I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I was OK being taken away.”

She worked on the streets, as an escort, in massage parlours and strip clubs.

“I couldn’t admit that I was not there by choice. We couldn’t live in our own skin if we admitted that. We needed to believe that it was our choice.”

Her pimp promised to marry her if she made enough money. She did. They married.

Outwardly, they lived a high life with expensive cars and a luxury home.

The reality was a world apart.

“I serviced police officers and I know girls who got high with their drug counsellors.”

Falle’s husband tortured her. Several times he broke her arms. Three times he broke her nose. He burned her so many times on her neck and chest that she’s spent thousands of dollars on laser surgery to erase the scars — both physical and emotional.

He even held a gun to her head.

Her best friend was murdered; shot in the head by her pimp.

For years, Falle fought drug use. But after a decade, she bought a $30 bag of cocaine. It masked her pain — “I was an instant addict.”

Twelve years ago, on her 27th birthday, she went home to her mom who was still struggling with her alcohol addiction.

“I told her I’m a prostitute. I’m a drug addict and I have a pimp who’s trafficked me across the country.

“She rocked me for hours and hours.”

Falle decided never to go back. It wasn’t easy. She admits that it was years before she finally gave up hoping that her husband might change.

Falle got her Grade-12 equivalency, went to college and then to university.

Today, she teaches in Humber College’s police foundations program and speaks to groups wherever she’s asked.

Her message is simple: The women and girls being trafficked and prostituted are not just somebody’s daughters, they may well be the children of your friends or neighbours.

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Daphne Bramham: Vulnerable Canadian girls preyed on like ‘little bunnies in the forest’

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